So I am a scientist, playing in the field where the basic sciences intersect, with big hopes of figuring out how to make life a bit easier and happier for living beings on this planet. I work at a big research institution in Brazil, funded with federal and state money.
The jungle I am referring to is the bureaucratic web one has to go through while performing science in my country, when trying to peek deeply into relevant issues using state of the art tools of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Most of the reagents and parts for equipment we use (or, in my case, built) to study the molecular basis of diseases like Leukemia and Dengue fever are imported from overseas.
The prices we pay in the end are on the order of three to five times what I used to pay for the same things when doing research as a student and post-doctoral fellow in the US. And the time it takes for any tiny vial of DNA, or ultra pure glucose or some other innocuous substance, to arrive at my bench, is in the order of months, while there it was a matter of a few days, almost never over a week. That said, once we have all the toys in our hands, what we do with it and how we present the results is exactly the same here in Campinas as it is in Berkeley, and we struggle to publish in the same international scientific journals and conferences.
And we are expected to innovate, compete and come up with brilliant discoveries, as if it was a fair game.
We tend to focus on issues that are relevant to our surroundings here, and we do have huge economic disparities and education issues and basic health problems that are more pressing than deciphering the mechanisms of viral infection. But hey, this is our problem too!
So how should I deal with the conflict, when I feel like complaining about the enzymes that go bad while in transit to my laboratory because of the rules of international trade, while people across the town are struggling to feed their kids and give them proper basic education? The money spent on those reagents (and on my salary, for that matter) comes from the same sources, and we are also trying to make life better for all. Sounds entangled to you?
I can bet that, as I write this, thousands of bright young scientists around the globe are going through the same issues. But we are all unquiet minds, so we'll keep fighting to stay in the game.
Carolina Zeri is a bio-physical-chemist running a laboratory performing basic research in Structural Biology in Brazil, and wondering how to get more people interested.
